Good questions, Manning6. From your assessment, it seems the LED lights would last about half as long as they would without the flicker correction. If the flickering bothers you, this may be a reasonable trade-off.

My ex has epilepsy. One year we both fell into the Christmas Tree as she had a seizure and I tried to catch her. I would suggest that the makers of AC LED lighting be very careful about flickering. Flickering lights can be a trigger for epileptic seizures.

Without researching the issue I'd guess that LEDs have a sharper on/off brightness response than a heated wire does.

On another note, I've taken night shots at the drag races; the ones where I slow the exposure and follow the cars have clear car images, blurred stationary stuff (fences and guard rails for instance), and stretched out multi-pulsed images of the high wattage track lights... The first time I saw it it was a surprise.

I agree with D Sherman. In my household I am the only one who deals with electrical Christmas decorations so I was not concerned. Using the slavaged plug from a scrapped string of mini lights will give 3 amp protection for most erroneously pluged in devices. Plugging in a string of incandescent mini lights will not be a problem. I have done this and they work OK.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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